HUIZINGA ON GOETHE

AM | @HDI1780

"Maar zij gaven de wereld een Bach en een Goethe" — Johan Huizinga

There are some books that one buys just because of an idea, a sentence, a line. This happened to me a few years back while wandering through the bookshelves of the wonderful De Slegte in Amsterdam. The book in question was a grim account of the state of Western civilization by Dutch historian Johan Huizinga. Published in 1945, its title was suggestive enough: Geschonden wereld ("The world disfigured"). Yet Huizinga saw light at the end of the tunnel. Here's the line that prompted me to buy it:

Goethe is niet te denken in een Duitschen eenheidstaat.

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The idea that knowledge may be "dwarfed by authority" can be traced to David Hume's essay "Of the rise and progress of the arts and sciences" (1742). In order to be allowed to flourish, says Hume, the arts and sciences must "break the progress of authority":

If we consider the face of the globe, EUROPE, of all the four parts of the world, is the most broken by seas, rivers, and mountains; and GREECE of all countries of EUROPE. Hence these regions were naturally divided into several distinct governments. And hence the sciences arose in GREECE; and EUROPE has been hitherto the most constant habitation of them.

The argument is applied to China, where "the sciences have made so slow a progress". In the 1780 edition of Histoire des deux Indes (i.xx, pp. 125ff), Diderot further develops Hume's idea in his brilliant discussion of China [see] (*).

(*) See Anthony Pagden's excellent review of the leading Aufklärer views on China, in chapter 6 of The Enlightenment and why it still matters. Oxford University Press, 2013.
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